Materialism Without Materials

Lukas Verburgt has written an interesting post on OOO and materialism. Here’s a taste:

The most common misunderstanding about object-oriented ontology is probably that it entails a rigid materialism. Since it talks of ‘materials’ and often does this with reference to ‘beings’ it seems not unfair to label it as a contemporary ‘materialist ontology’ (reminiscent of both Lucretius’ atoms and different Marxist positions). And a title like Material Beings would probably count as a good candidate for any object-oriented publication.

Actually, there is a book, by Peter van Ingwagen, that is called ‘Material Beings’. Is he, a University of Notre Dame metaphysician, an object-oriented philosopher then? In brief, he argues that all material objects are made up of elementary particles, such that random everyday objects do in fact not exist; they are abstractions of a certain arrangement of elementary particles. As Van Ingwagen puts it, where it seems that there is a table, there are just elementary particles arranged tablewise. Importantly, an everyday abstraction like a table does not count as an object and thus, given materialist rigor, does not exist. They, perhaps give the impression that we are allowed to talk of an object, but we are not; tables are like a or on pair with a pack of wolves – we refer to it as a single object or entity, but for Van Ingwagen they are mere abstractions. This allows him to focus on objects and nothing but objects. So, he seems quite object-oriented to say the least.

Actually, he is not. And the fact that such a figure as Van Ingwagen is not relates to the fact that object-oriented ontology is having a hard time to free itself of the ‘accusation’ of materialism as well as to the justified question; ‘what exactly is the meaning of materialism’? I totally agree with both Levi Bryant’s and Ian Bogost’s (see here and here); materialism seems to be everywhere these days (‘new materialism’, ‘neo-materialism’ etc. etc.) but it is questionable what it actually comes down to.

Actually there is a bit of a friendly debate in OOO surrounding this very issue. Bogost and I are both fall under the materialist wing of OOO. Although she does not call herself an object-oriented philosopher, Bennett would be included in this camp as well. Hopefully I’m not putting words in Ian’s mouth, but when Ian and I say we’re perplexed by much of what is called materialism, this is not because we’re rejecting materialism, but because we don’t see what’s materialistic in these orientations. For example, how is Badiou’s thesis that “the whole is not” a materialist thesis? And here I’m thinking of materialism in the Lucretian sense of everything being composed of matter. I will say, however, that I’ve come a long way in my understanding of why certain Marxists, Foucaultians, Althusserians, etc., refer to themselves as materialists. They are making the claim that it is material practices (working on things, building things, laboring, etc) that drive history and social formations, not ideas, norms, or concepts.

I’m not sure where Morton stands, but Harman, by contrast, rejects materialism and for very much the reasons that Lukas outlines in his post. At the CUNY event, Harman, Bennett, and I had a really great discussion on this issue. For Graham, materialism undermines objects. One example Graham gave was the Wall Street stock exchange. Paraphrasing Graham, he said something like “if we say that Wall Street is material, are we saying that it’s nothing more than its bricks, fiber optic cables, computers, etc?” In other words, under this conception of materialism, the objectness of Wall Street evaporates in the way described by van Ingwagen. They become mere “abstracta”.

This is certainly not a version of materialism that I accept. For me there are nothing but material entities. Everything that exists must be physical in some way or another (though I admit that I go back and forth in the case of numbers), but this doesn’t entail that things can be dissolved into elementary parts or units like atoms. Relations among parts are crucial as well and these relations cannot be reduced to their parts. It wouldn’t ever occur to me to treat the bricks of Wall Street as a part of Wall Street because these entities are not a part of the ongoing autopoiesis of Wall Street. All that I require is that form be physically embodied in some way or another and that there be some form of real material connection when entities interact (no magic, no action at a distance, nothing supernatural). Nonetheless, there is emergence that gives rise to unities that can’t be reduced to their parts. The parts can come and go while maintaining the form of the entity, but they are nonetheless replaced by other material parts.

It comes as a surprise to me to see materialism characterized in these sort of reductivist terms, though when I reflect on Democritus, Lucretius, and Van Ingwagen, I can see how there is one version of materialism that indeed undermines substances or individuals. I just don’t happen to share that materialism insofar as I advocate the phenomenon of emergence. At any rate, I’m an unrepentant materialist, I think it’s the only truly productive philosophical thesis that’s ever been articulated, I think it’s liberating and emancipating, and I think it fills our sense of the world with wonder and beauty. If people reject OOO (my version anyway) because it’s materialist I suppose that’s something I’ll have to live with.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

12 Responses to “Materialism Without Materials”

Levi, I agree on the fact that I didn’t choose my words with sufficient care. I meant to describe that the kind of materialism of which OOO is often accused, is actually a kind of materialism that OOO would reject. The Van Ingwagen-point was to show what this kind of materialism entails and that it is, in fact, a materialism-without-materials. It is not to necessary to reject this position as such, but to proof that it is internally ‘moot’. This latter relates to your point, then; it is indeed unclear what it is that makes this Van Ingwagen materialism materialistic in the first place.

Hopefully this both justifies my remark that OOO is trying to free itself of the accusation of ‘materialism’ and shows that this does not mean that OOO can’t be or isn’t rigorously materialist.

Oh no worries Lukas. I wasn’t bothered. Your post was just a good opportunity to expand on my own positions and talk about some of the debates we’ve been having. Additionally I’m not familiar with Van Ingwagen, so it was great to come across this. Great post!

Where do fictional objects fit in? I’m curious, not critical, because Kris Coffield talks in person and in lectures about his very detailed theory of fictional objects. I don’t think he’s publicized it yet, but I’m curious to know if your materialist vision requires the reduction of fictional objects to their nonfictional components, like reducing a character in a movie to the technological configurations that give rise to the character we see – the actor, the camera, the electronic signals, etc.

Ian Bogost’s “tiny ontology” doesn’t differentiate between the fictional character and everything that goes into it. For him, as far as I can tell, the character, the signals, the neuronal connections are all equally “real.” Where do you stand and how does this inflect (or how is it inflected by) your materialism?

I partly ask because of there seem to be certain objects that are problematic. One example we’ve discussed in class is that of dreams and nightmares. The content of a nightmare is fictional, though you could make a strong case for the materialism of the neurological processes and psychological impulses that are made manifest by the nightmare. Nonetheless, it exists only for me and can cause great anxiety? Is the nightmare reduced to my anxiety, subconscious fears, etc. or does it exist as an independent entity?

Levi,
With regard to Badiou’s thesis that the One is not as being materialist, I think this is related to his attack on empiricism in favor of a ‘mathematical platonist’ vision of materiality. I think the crucial work in this regard is his early stuff: Mark and Lack, The Concept of Model, and On Zero. A good summary of his position can be read in Ray’s paper ‘Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics’ or in his more recent “Badiou and Science” in the Justin Clemen’s collection ‘Basic Concepts’. The basic idea is that, against Quine, there is a third dogma of empiricism, which is the form-content distinction. Whereas the empiricist tradition takes scientific theories to consist of an axiomatics which models empirical reality, Badiou highlights how advances in the 20th Century conception of science actually show that this is not the case. There is no externality intrinsic to the scientific procedure which is roughly tethered to something like ‘the outside world’ or ‘experience’; which fills out the empty forms or theories of the axiomatic theory. Theory does not model reality.

On the contrary, Badiou shows that the concept of model that is informed by the 20th Century is thoroughly mathematized. We have two components: on the one hand an axiomatics, which provides the combination rules, as well as a syntax. On the other, we have a semantics which is entirely specified by what he calls a ‘domain of interpretation’; and which is in physics as a set. The idea is then that the domain of interpretation is a model for the axiomatic theory; the latter is tested with regards to a particularly specified set. But this means that the ‘matter’ upon which theories work is not in any ways inscribed transcendentally to its mathematical inscription: domains are thoroughly mathematical. Of course, herein underlies a peculiar nod towards the more mathematical sciences, and physics in particular. The idea is that what endows science its scientificity is precisely its mathematicity, the fact that every time it sheds of whatever vestige of ideology envelops it by philosophical categories or ideological notions. Rather, scientific concepts, every time, in a intricate historical dialectic, precisely shed away whatever appeals to a mystical ‘outside’ is claim by developing a further layer of stratification to its ideography which becomes then irreducible to the descriptive means of its ideological time. Of course, one might think that this occludes aspects of ‘experimental activity’ that are considered proper to science, but in this regard Badiou thinks science immanently does not make recourse to such ‘pragmatic’ considerations. In fact, the subordination of the mathematical kernel of scientific productivity, which is tested within the formal apparatus described above, to ‘experimental conditions’ surreptitiously subordinates the barren materiality of the matheme to subjective-pragmatic considerations about scientific activity. Badiou’s idea that the ‘matter of scientific theory’ is in fact, immanently, nothing but sets as such, goes on to therefore invert this subordination, and say that the intensional determinant ‘human’, or ‘activity’, or ‘use’, is in fact a rehabilitation of a ‘content’ which underlies the formalizing delirium proper to scientific activity. The dialectic between philosophy, ideology and science, is therefore quite contrived. Take the following quote:

“The first break is the point at which scientific discourse subverts its current ideological representation by producing a difference that cannot be subsumed by extant philosophical categories. Philosophy then represents this break by de-stratifying (re-categorizing) this stratified difference, thereby re-enveloping the new concepts produced by science within extant ideological notions (these will be novel philosophical categories). Lastly, the moment of reconfiguration is the moment of the second break understood as a re-stratification of what philosophy has de-stratified; a re-stratification wherein the parameters of scientific discourse are re-established independently of science’s current philosophical representation.”

Apropos of this, Brassier writes:

“Badiou’s account is one in which there is nothing that science cannot know because, dispensing with every vestige of substance, Badiou’s formalist ontology leaves no room for the inconceivable or unconceptualizable. Truth is the sole exception to the order of being, but science is one of the harbingers of truth.”

This is the meaning behind Badiou’s famous early statement that, ‘there is no subject OF science’. Science itself is a subject, when it undertakes its stratification independent of all conceptual representation. But this agency is strictly speaking not one which ‘anthropomorphically scaled’, or human, or individual, cast under the whim and projects of an affective will. On the contrary, its a purely formal subjectivity, in what concerns science. Thus Badiou opposes the Husserlian melodrama about the ‘crisis of European’ sciences, wherein sciences would find themselves at a loss of foundation being wrested away from their experiential ground or ‘lifeworld’. Or as in Heidegger, in being wrested from their ‘worldly’ dimension. Radically anti-phenomenological, and anti-vitalist, Badiou’s ‘materialist dialectic’ radicalizes the earlier Althusserian split between ideology and science and, through the resources of set-theory, understands scientific productivity as the subtraction from ideologico-philosophical envelopment through formal stratification. Badiou’s position here is really remarkable:

“[T]here is no subject of science. Infinitely stratified, adjusting its transitions, science is a pure space, without a reverse or mark or place of what it excludes. It is foreclosure, but foreclosure of nothing, and so can be called the psychosis of no subject, hence of all; fully universal, shared delirium, one only has to install oneself within it to become no-one, anonymously dispersed in the hierarchy of orders. Science is an Outside without a blind-spot…There are no crises within science.” (Badiou: ‘Mark and Lack’)

I think this presents a very interesting debate with respect to your position, which feeds from Bhaskar and Pickering. I wrote this post where I outline how I see the question playing out. It is long, and muddled, but the question of a non-representational account of scientific productivity seems difficult to reconcile with questions about relations about the ontological status of what Pickering calls ‘domains of phenomena’. Are these domains merely theoretical groupings of ‘phenomena’ which we find in the world? If the domains are produced, then this surely cannot mean that the phenomena themselves are produced, lest we want to claim science makes no discoveries or transformation. So there must be a putative independence of the phenomena with respect to their productive allotment in ‘domains’; but then the question arises about how the phenomena coincide with their inscription within domains, and this is resolutely a representational question. Questions about ‘resistance’, ‘out-of-phasing’ are all experimental conditions which however remain tethered to the postulate phenomena as such. But is there any way to speak of these phenomena irrespective of their incorporation into domains? How does one determine that which is ‘out-of-phase’ with its inscription within the postulates of the theory, i.e. how are these phenomena themselves-individuated. The domains must then be in a sense not just produced, but correspondent or adequate to these. So I think representation isn’t exactly out of the picture; but I’m sure The Democracy of Objects will clarify your position with respect to this more clearly.

I get Badiou’s reasons for calling himself a materialist, I just don’t think his position qualifies as a materialism, that’s all. This mathematization, in my view, conflates matter with what describes matter (maths) and is 2) therefore a form of idealism. “Platonic materialism” is an oxymoron in my book.

Another question just occurred to me.Do you think people’s resistance to your ideas about materialism and fictions result, in part, from a confusion of questions about what qualifies as an object and what qualifies as “real,” in other words a conflation of epistemological questions with ontological questions?

Daniel: I was interested in your gloss on Badiou. Offhand his position seems rather odd (but this may reflect my relative unfamiliarity with his work). One can argue, for sure, that any formal system has a set theoretical model. Indeed many formal systems have more than one model from the domain of set theory. For example, the Lowenhiem-Skolem Theorem proves that any system with an uncountably infinite model has a countable model. This generate a difficulty since even the theory of real numbers (which, if true, must have an uncountable model) can also have a model smaller than the intended domain of interpretation.

But that aside, how does Badiou infer from the fact that all theories can be given set theoretical models that they have only set-theoretical models?

Levi: I’m sympathetic to your ontological position, much more so than with Harman’s, but emergence, as you know, is a difficult concept. A viable theory of emergence has to how that the emergent properties are both autonomous from and dependent on what they emerge from. The only uncontested version of this thus far is Bedau’s weak emergence and this only says that emergent properties cannot be inferred from their subvening properties (e.g. microproperties). But weak emergence is quite compatible with a universe in which all the causal action, so to speak, is at a microphysical level (e.g. cellular automata display weakly emergent properties). I don’t see that this secures the ontological autonomy physical composites. But then what does?

Yeah, emergence is tricky. I agree with both of your criteria (that emergence must show both that the qualities are autonomous from and dependent on whatever they emerge from). For me, all that’s required is that the emergent entity have powers or capacities that can’t be found in any of the parts (recall I individuate entities not by their qualities but by their powers or capacities). My cat is able to do things in the world that its cells are not. The liver of my cat is able to do things that its cells do not. I don’t think there’s anything deeply mysterious or spooky here (or I hope not).

David: I do not see what is the problem that follows from LS theorem. Sure, we can derive the necessary existence of a denumerable model from any domain whose cardinality is non-denumerable (successor to w0). This does not present any problem for the theory of Real numbers; it presents a problem for the notion of category, which obtains in relations of isomorphy. But this is a problem for questions of cardinality for first-order formal systems; it is a very restricted problem which has no obvious ontological problems.

Your second question seems rather strange as well. A model is a set, so by definition all models are sets. Insofar as what endows science its scientific status is its formalizing deposition of all intensional determinants in a transparent extensional axiomatics, that a set serves as a generic description for a model is simply to reassert that its formal inscription is in fact reducible to it. Check out The Concept of Model for this question more clearly. Also, this entry in Luke’s forum is of help:

[…] abstractions on our part from elementary particles as in the case, as Lukas reminds us, of Van Ingwagen. Likewise, despite his respect for the existence of a plurality of substances, Leibniz, in his […]